[1.7+] Making Scenariory(Custom Scenario)

[Missingno200]

I actually have no clue where this goes, so please move it if it's in the wrong spot.

What a wonderful day it is, on the really old outdated and frankly nostalgic at this point launchpad, where a mission is about to take a place. A mission that will Make History and... Actually I'm pretty sure noone's going to jump at this. You can see the moon-Alright you know what, that's enough of that. If you wanna skip everything and just download the file, click here. This post is an absolute mess and I do not blame you for just wanting to skip most of it. If you want to read my ramblings, please continue on. I plan to clean up this post eventually, but it's 5 in the morning and I'm tired.

Making Scenariory is (maybe? Probably? Unlikely?) the first user created scenario(not that it means much...) and it's what it says on the tin. A critique on the Stayputnik, and the absolute utter annoyance it is to not have SAS on it when literally EVERY OTHER  UNMANNED  COMMAND  CORE THAT  HAS EXISTED DOES. Ignoring my flash of anger there, critics will say that this scenario was designed to be the worst possible scenario in history, and then rudely ask you how the heck you got into their house and why your pants were down, but BAH, what do they know about art? They're not the artists, I'm the artist!

I've gone through the effort to make the mission as challenging and as painful as possible. This means you cannot timewarp the mission, there is no quick loading, no map, and ESPECIALLY, for some reason, NO GOING BACK TO THE MAIN MENU. Yeah, I'm just as surprised as you are that I'm even allowed to do that. The craft you see below is the craft you will be using to land on the Mün, which appears to have wasted fuel and oxidizer, so you basically only have 1/2 of it left, and 8 units of monopropellant. Sitting in a low orbit around the Mün, deorbiting is the easy part. It's the landing and not spiraling out of control that is the hard part. It's possible, but it's really hard.

To install, download the scenario and put it in your scenarios folder that is located in the KSP saves folder. By default, for windows, this is located here(C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Kerbal Space Program\saves\scenarios\). After that is done, you're good to go. You don't even need to reboot KSP!

 

Spoiler

Final thoughts:Making this was a bit of a pain honestly, although maybe because I'm just an idiot. Note to self:Never include ships that have kerbals when you clear the kerbal roster for a few saved kilobytes.

But seriously, I designed these craft as badly as possible. The only way I could've made them worse is if I didn't use a generator and didn't include a reaction wheel, but I'm not that cruel. Yet. I'm legitimately curious on how you guys will land this craft on the Mün, as it takes SKILL to land something without SAS. And with your limited fuel and god awful RCS(seriously, RCS is a near no-go without SAS), one questions how this is even possible. But it's possible, I tell you, POSSIBLE! And that is why I'd like you to record this, to see your reactions to this hellish mission. The prize if you do this? I'll add a secret prize.

While developing the mission, I decided to enable IVA in the Asteroid Mission for literally no reason, and well... "It's a good view in there, isn't it Bill?"

The stuff I'm able to do with this single file is honestly... Amazing. I think there could be actual potential in this, I just am not sure where to direct this potential. That is why I'm going to write a scenario editor, to do what Squad has failed to do! At least later. Right now, I got to figure out why half of these values even exist or what they do.

Even more baffling, "CanLeaveToMainMenu = False" actually works.

Album of all the pictures used in this post

 

[Missingno200]

I just noticed the entire premise is screwed because I can't seem to disable SAS for all probes... with scenarios. Squad, why do you do this to me? I guess pretend the SAS isn't there? I'll have to think of a new way to make this scenario more challenging later. How this got past me is beyond me...

Edited April 19, 2019 by Missingno200

[JadeOfMaar]

@Missingno200 I think this kind of release belongs over here: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/forum/98-making-history-missions/ This board is for mods and content packs (excluding craft files) for mods.

Edited April 19, 2019 by JadeOfMaar

[cineboxandrew]

its pretty easy to write a MM patch to give the stayputnik SAS you know...

[Snark]

4 hours ago, Missingno200 said:

Making Scenariory is (maybe? Probably? Unlikely?) the first user created scenario(not that it means much...)

Whoa, cool!  I don't think I've ever actually seen someone do that before, and I've been around long enough that I'm not super easy to surprise these days. 

So I think it does "mean much"-- it's not often I see a user in the forums here forging genuinely new ground for user-created content, so well done!

4 hours ago, Missingno200 said:

I actually have no clue where this goes, so please move it if it's in the wrong spot.

1 hour ago, JadeOfMaar said:

@Missingno200 I think this kind of release belongs over here: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/forum/98-making-history-missions/

Actually, speaking as a forum moderator, I'm not entirely sure where this goes, myself. 

You've managed to do something exceedingly rare these days, i.e. come up with a new category of "stuff".  It's not exactly a "mod" in the traditional sense of "thing that puts part models or plugin code into GameData", which is what pretty much everything in "Add-on Releases" has been up to now.  On the other hand, it doesn't belong in Making History Missions (sorry, @JadeOfMaar), because it's not actually a "mission", it's a "scenario"-- different thing entirely, and has nothing to do with Missing History per se.  And it's not as though we have a dedicated subforum for "Scenarios", since AFAIK nobody's made one up to now.

So anyway, we just now saw this and are kinda scratching our heads as to whether it needs moving (and, if so, where), so thank you for bearing with us for a bit while we mull it over. 

Incidentally, @Missingno200, if you're willing to make the installation instructions a bit more involved, you can tinker with the abilities of probe cores by using a ModuleManager patch.  You could add SAS to the Stayputnik in your own games if you want.  Or, if you wanted to modify this downloadable scenario by removing SAS from all probe cores, you could do that, too.  It would involve writing a .cfg file that needs to go in GameData somewhere, meaning that you'd need to update the installation instructions thereby (as well as taking a dependency on ModuleManager).

Anyway, thanks for taking the time and effort to make a new and interesting thing for your fellow KSPers to play with!

[Missingno200]

 

15 hours ago, Snark said:

You've managed to do something exceedingly rare these days, i.e. come up with a new category of "stuff".  It's not exactly a "mod" in the traditional sense of "thing that puts part models or plugin code into GameData", which is what pretty much everything in "Add-on Releases" has been up to now.  On the other hand, it doesn't belong in Making History Missions (sorry, @JadeOfMaar), because it's not actually a "mission", it's a "scenario"-- different thing entirely, and has nothing to do with Missing History per se.  And it's not as though we have a dedicated subforum for "Scenarios", since AFAIK nobody's made one up to now.

16 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

@Missingno200 I think this kind of release belongs over here: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/forum/98-making-history-missions/ This board is for mods and content packs (excluding craft files) for mods.

Speaking as a poor guy, I don't actually own Making History(I even made a bit of a comment about this(although it appears I was a dirty liar way back then and am still a very rambly person today) way back during the announcements when I asked about early access Steam users getting the expansion pack), which means that no, it's not even remotely a part of that since you can do this entirely within the base game with some manual save file fiddling. On the note of someone not making a scenario for KSP up until now, it's not exactly the same thing but I believe Kethane used to have a tutorial, or at least this guy from a thread that I can no longer find said that it might've. I know there have been a bunch of threads with people asking about how to create custom scenarios as far back as 2012 but as far as I know, this is the first one publicly released.

As for the entire managing to do the exceedingly rare comment, I'm not sure if it needs a response but might as well be thorough here:Well, where there's a will there is definitely a way, and I suppose I was sort of driven to get my name on the pages of history. That is certainly one way to get someone to innovate for new categories for gameplay, by promising them a page on history and also to be the first one to truly break ground there.
Semi-related fun fact:The entire name of the scenario(Making Scenariory) is a reference to the Making History expansion pack.

15 hours ago, cineboxandrew said:

its pretty easy to write a MM patch to give the stayputnik SAS you know...

15 hours ago, Snark said:

Incidentally, @Missingno200, if you're willing to make the installation instructions a bit more involved, you can tinker with the abilities of probe cores by using a ModuleManager patch.  You could add SAS to the Stayputnik in your own games if you want.  Or, if you wanted to modify this downloadable scenario by removing SAS from all probe cores, you could do that, too.  It would involve writing a .cfg file that needs to go in GameData somewhere, meaning that you'd need to update the installation instructions thereby (as well as taking a dependency on ModuleManager).

I know I can add SAS to the Stayputnik myself but frankly, that means I have to wait for another while after each update, plus sometimes I want the challenge. Plus, to be honest, I wouldn't be too angry about this if the Stayputnik wasn't alone(either have consistency or don't make a black sheep, pick one and stick with it), but there's basically an option when starting new games that you could literally rename to "Enable SAS on Stayputnik"(referring to the option to "Enable SAS on all probe cores") because the Stayputnik is the only one without SAS. Even the Rovermate has SAS for some reason. This option is a minor problem when it comes to custom scenarios, and especially a big problem the very basis of Making Scenariory, where you're not supposed to have SAS.

15 hours ago, Snark said:

So anyway, we just now saw this and are kinda scratching our heads as to whether it needs moving (and, if so, where), so thank you for bearing with us for a bit while we mull it over. 

Anyway, thanks for taking the time and effort to make a new and interesting thing for your fellow KSPers to play with!

Ah, no worries man, I'm a bit surprised I'm the first to break ground here. I hope others do start doing the same, although I might make a scenario editor to help others get into this, seeing as it is a little fiddly to work with. There is SO much potential with scenarios it's not even funny.

Some final things I thought I'd talk about... A problem I encountered with making custom scenarios, which frustrated me a bit, is that you cannot turn off the SAS for all probe cores in scenarios, unless presumably you modify how scenarios work directly in the engine. I do not know why this is the case, considering all the other options from the commsnet to even some more obscure and really random ones(I mean, seriously, who needed to ability to disable the MAIN MENU!?) work just fine, but there might be some work arounds for it, maybe even just making a custom probe part that is somehow exempt from this difficulty option. Now, scenario, I've poked around a little but I'm still breaking ground on what you can and cannot do, but honestly, there is a LOT you can do in this game that I'm surprised your even allowed to do. My favorite one, the thing I think might become popular with most scenario creators, is the fact you can literally define CUSTOM TECH TREES for your scenario. This you means you TOTALLY can do a more difficult KSP without even needing to touch the existing tech trees or fiddling with mods. I think you can even get it to not look in the gamedata folder but just the general KSP Folder for these tech trees, which offers a lot. I think there is a way to also add the tutorial's popups to scenarios, but I haven't really tested it yet, but if this is the case, we are looking at some insane possibilities with scenarios. Honestly, since 0.17, Squad hasn't done much with scenarios, and it feels like a crime because the scenarios are so versatile and even have the ability to work in career and science gamemodes, it really feels like it's a crime that must be rectified by the community. This scenario isn't my first foray into the scenario scene, by the ways, but it is the first successful one. My original first had you dealing with 4 parts and was designed as basically a challenge to get to the moon, but I got delayed heavily as a result to a hard drive crash that basically destroyed my steam to tinker with KSP for a while.

I am still somehow really bad at forum posts apparently, because I accidentally screwed up. Whoops.

Edited April 20, 2019 by Missingno200

[Vanamonde]

Well, it's a mission and it requires Making History, so Making History Missions seems like the place for this thread. 

Whoops. Sorry. Misread the post. Looks like it's a challenge. Sorry for the confusion. 

[Xurkitree]

Wow. We can actually do this? THis would make an interesting challenge type - one where you create custom scenarios with a preset ship and you have to complete the scenario off.

[Superfluous J]

This looks really cool, both as a scenario and as a new idea of how to play. Kudos to you!

[dnbattley]

Very cool find/re-discovery!

Done, with 95m/s in the tank at T+5:23. Piloted by hand, but KER and better burn time both assisted. Would have been better dV but for nearly landing in the crater and having to "hop" beside it.

Spoiler

Some spoilers/pointers for others who might be struggling:

Spoiler

1. The RCS is actively unhelpful. I adjusted the RCS actuation toggles to turn the top thruster off completely, and make the linear thrusters respond to fore/aft only.

2. Even after that I decided to use up all RCS fuel first to assist with de-orbiting, even before using the side LOX thrusters.

3. Turning off gimbal on the LOX thrusters made fine motion easier

4. ACTIVATE FINE CONTROL!

5. You have plenty of fuel to do a moderately "step"-wise decent, where you will aim to wipe off horizontal velocity before focusing on vertical velocity.

 

PS. Love the snark in the .sfs file

Edited April 29, 2019 by dnbattley

[dnbattley]

On 4/20/2019 at 5:40 AM, Missingno200 said:

A problem I encountered with making custom scenarios, which frustrated me a bit, is that you cannot turn off the SAS...

I spent a little time looking at the scenario files this evening to try and understand them, and see what you mean about the flexibility (you can set it up to roll the in-game credits!!!). On the specific point of disabling SAS for the piloting challenge did you consider a low skill engineer/scientist-manned lander, instead of a probe? They should be prevented from engaging SAS in career (/science?) mode, if the scenario set up determines that.

I'd like to contribute to moving this forward, and to that end would like to see a space to discuss and share understanding of the language: it may be that a separate forum is overkill and discussion can be restricted to one or two posts, though.

[Snark]

Congratulations on earning Thread of the Month! 

[vyznev]

Yay, I did it!   (Well, at least I think I did it. Not sure if there was supposed to be some kind of a success indication? It's been such a long time since I last played any scenarios in KSP that I'm honestly not sure...)

Flown on KSP 1.7.0 with no mods used. (I did have MechJeb2 installed, but the craft doesn't have the parts needed to enable it anyway.) I used to rely on KER a lot, but the new UI features in stock 1.6 and 1.7 really do make playing without it a lot more practical. The altitude indicator mode toggle is particularly helpful for landings like this.

(Also, I assume the fact that I actually had access to SAS and even all the prograde/retrograde/maneuver/etc. hold options — see around 1:20 in the video — is probably a bug? Not sure what's causing it.   I flew the landing with SAS off, anyway, since I assumed that's how it was intended to be done.)

Edited May 8, 2019 by vyznev

[dnbattley]

12 minutes ago, vyznev said:

Yay, I did it! 

And a text book landing, to boot

I think the next stage is to attempt to land with reaction wheels off... what do you think?

[vyznev]

17 minutes ago, dnbattley said:

And a text book landing, to boot

I think the next stage is to attempt to land with reaction wheels off... what do you think?

An excellent suggestion! 

I also decided to spend all my monoprop on the deorbit burn, and flew the rest of the landing using engine gimbals only. Everything went pretty close to perfect, except that I slightly overestimated the impact tolerance of the landing legs and broke them. But I still count that as a successful landing.

(Impatient viewers may wish to skip the part from 2:10 to 5:10 where I spend three minutes doing absolute nothing but watching the probe slowly spin around while falling towards the surface. I'd have timewarped past that, but somebody went and disabled that feature.  )

[dnbattley]

Per challenge rules, I felt obligated to do this too . Cue up the Benny Hill theme tune...

 

 

[Missingno200]

Oh dang, I was dead for a bit(school work got to me), I did not notice this got so popular. 

On 4/29/2019 at 7:30 AM, 5thHorseman said:

This looks really cool, both as a scenario and as a new idea of how to play. Kudos to you!

Thank you very much. Took a while to make it so I'm glad people like it.

On 4/29/2019 at 4:11 PM, dnbattley said:

I spent a little time looking at the scenario files this evening to try and understand them, and see what you mean about the flexibility (you can set it up to roll the in-game credits!!!). On the specific point of disabling SAS for the piloting challenge did you consider a low skill engineer/scientist-manned lander, instead of a probe? They should be prevented from engaging SAS in career (/science?) mode, if the scenario set up determines that.

I tried that, it seems to ignore that logic too, although given the circumstances I may have just incorrectly done it. It confounds me why it does that. 

On 4/29/2019 at 4:11 PM, dnbattley said:

I'd like to contribute to moving this forward, and to that end would like to see a space to discuss and share understanding of the language: it may be that a separate forum is overkill and discussion can be restricted to one or two posts, though.

Yeah, I might set that up or participate in one when the FAM(free addon market) catches up eventually , but in the meantime, schoolwork is a major focus since school's wrapping up.

On 5/1/2019 at 10:36 AM, Snark said:

Congratulations on earning Thread of the Month! 

This fills my heart up with pride. Thank you for putting me there, even if I'm 9 days late to respond.

On 5/8/2019 at 12:38 PM, vyznev said:

Yay, I did it!   (Well, at least I think I did it. Not sure if there was supposed to be some kind of a success indication? It's been such a long time since I last played any scenarios in KSP that I'm honestly not sure...)

<Distressed mission control noises as you land without your landing gear deployed.>
Yeah, you did it alright, congratulations on that! That's a lot harder than it looks honestly. You also can catch a glimpse of the easteregg craft in your video.
As for scenarios, there's no real way to put a success indicator in them without meddling with the translation files and probably game files we don't even have the ability to edit successfully yet. A little bit annoying, but you can do?

On 5/8/2019 at 12:38 PM, vyznev said:

(Also, I assume the fact that I actually had access to SAS and even all the prograde/retrograde/maneuver/etc. hold options — see around 1:20 in the video — is probably a bug? Not sure what's causing it. I flew the landing with SAS off, anyway, since I assumed that's how it was intended to be done.)

Yepperoni. Don't worry about it, it's not your fault, it's a weird way of how the game handles scenario files just ever so slightly differently. Kind of annoying though. Might make a V2 of this mission with a crewed module if I can get that to work without SAS.

On 5/8/2019 at 1:33 PM, vyznev said:

On 5/8/2019 at 12:53 PM, dnbattley said:

I think the next stage is to attempt to land with reaction wheels off... what do you think?

An excellent suggestion! 

<Fire department is called as mission control burns to the ground.>
Seriously though, that's Jebediah levels of crazy and you succeeded. You are a certified badass, and you have my total respect for that one. I wish I was half as good of a pilot as you are.

On 5/8/2019 at 1:33 PM, vyznev said:

(Impatient viewers may wish to skip the part from 2:10 to 5:10 where I spend three minutes doing absolute nothing but watching the probe slowly spin around while falling towards the surface. I'd have timewarped past that, but somebody went and disabled that feature.  )

Sorry? Eheheh... Admittedly, I may have gone overboard when first making the scenario(Although if you had any even remotely barebones editing software like Windows Movie Maker, you could have just done a jump cut or even sped up the clip.)

On 5/8/2019 at 2:18 PM, dnbattley said:

Per challenge rules, I felt obligated to do this too . Cue up the Benny Hill theme tune...

Not bad man, outside of the fact you decided to try to land in a crater(well I guess you didn't decide, you just kind of did), that went pretty smoothly. Ironically, the hardest part of this entire scenario isn't even landing without SAS or reaction wheels, it's trying to keep the lander on its landing gear.

Overall, I'm proud with this result, and I'm working on a new scenario, however first, I may make a simpler scenario to keep you on your toes and update this one before releasing that really big scenario. There's a chance I may never finish this big scenario because I have issues actually designing craft that can go from HKO to lunar landing. In any case, prepare to have this as your theme song when it releases.

Edited May 10, 2019 by Missingno200
Different song.

[dnbattley]

On 5/10/2019 at 11:50 AM, Missingno200 said:

I tried that, it seems to ignore that logic too, although given the circumstances I may have just incorrectly done it. It confounds me why it does that.

I made some breakthroughs on this specific point - the functionality appears to be governed by a number of settings:

AdvancedParams:

EnableKerbalExperience = True      // self explanatory

and then you set their level indirectly, by building up their XP via their personal log, thus:

CAREER_LOG
{
	flight = 0
	0 = Orbit,Kerbin
	0 = Suborbit,Kerbin
	0 = Orbit,Mun
	0 = Suborbit,Mun
	0 = Orbit,Minmus
	0 = Suborbit,Minmus
}

Finally, in the same section you need to ensure:

veteran = False       // appears to override other settings

I've used this knowledge to create a new scenario piloting challenge here.